Pentercost 11 C

Saint Margaret’s

Anglican Church

Budapest, Hungary

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29;

Luke 13:10-17

You are set free from your ailment.

Back in the mid-1970s, a very long time ago indeed,

when I was a young Roman Catholic priest serving in

the American Midwest, I was assigned for a time to

the Franciscan Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, a

large sanctuary devoted to Mary, the Mother of God,

and to healing and prayer. Located in a small town,

Carey, Ohio, it was yet not far from the urban, and

ethnic, centres of Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland. Carey, Ohio, and the

Shrine never quite became the American Lourdes or Fatima, but the sense of faith and

healing was no doubt just as strong and genuine. After all, the motto of the grotto was,

“Carry your cares to Carey.”

And every summer, busloads of Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian, and

Christian Palestinian pilgrims, among many others, would do just that, arriving at the

Shrine to pray and oftentimes to seek healing for their ills and ailments. And as often

as not, as pilgrims arrived in their throngs, they would immediately enter the Shrine

church en masse singing hymns in their native languages generally at the top of their

voices, whether it be the middle of Sunday mass or, for that matter, the middle of the

Sunday sermon. Proper Anglicans of course do no such things. In any case, as

disruptive as this invariably was to good order, to his credit the Franciscan guardian or

rector of the Shrine never once that I know of attempted to restore order and decorum,

as does the leader of the synagogue in this morning’s account from the Gospel of Luke.

Luke by the way is the only one of the four Evangelists who tells us of this miracle of

our Lord, the healing of a woman who has been crippled and bent over for eighteen

years; quite a long time to wait, if you ask me, even for a miracle, even for healing. By

the way, remind me to tell you during coffee hour the meaning of the number eighteen

in this account, at least according to the scholars. And this episode takes place,

remember, as our Lord and his disciples are making their way from their home base in

Galilee to Jerusalem and as Jesus is here found teaching in an unspecified synagogue

in an unnamed village somewhere along their path. I suppose it could have been

Carey, Ohio. Or here in Hungary, in our beautifully renovated church. In any case,

Jesus abruptly stops his sermon or bible-study mid-sentence, as disruptive as that

may have been, and heals this crippled woman. Some things simply cannot wait.Now, it is not for nothing, it seems to me, that this short but dramatic narrative of

healing and regeneration takes place specifically in a synagogue and on a Sabbath,

just about the most sacred intersection or juncture of time and space you can imagine;

a place and a time set apart from everyday affairs, from work and humdrum activity; a

time and a place in other words which together recall the days of Creation, God’s

Sabbath rest, and the Paradise of Eden. Jesus calls to the woman with the crippling

spirit as God calls to Adam and Eve in the Garden, he lays his hands upon her, and, as

the text tells us, he sets her free, free from the primordial chaos of sin which cripples

all of us.

As it does indeed the leader of the synagogue itself. For, the story, as short as it is, is

not over. The leader of the synagogue, of all people, raises objection to what he

describes as work being done on the Sabbath, namely, healing itself; objects in a

sense to creation and redemption, the very point of the Sabbath in the first place. For,

it is the Lord’s Sabbath rest, and ours, which brings not only regeneration but

redemption itself. The shame of this woman’s crippling affliction is overcome, while

the shame of the Synagogue leader has just begun. And Jesus, the Lord of Synagogue

and Sabbath, the Lord of time and space, does not himself rest until the work of

salvation is accomplished. Until we all stand up straight. Until we are all set free.

Until we are all healed.

Healing of course is not an end onto itself in the ministry of Jesus, though for those

healed I suppose it hardly mattered. It is not a magic trick. Healing rather heralds the

freedom of the Kingdom of which Jesus so often spoke, the freedom of Paradise itself.

The Kingdom transcends this world of pain and mortality. And most importantly, it was

and is at hand, within grasp, never far away. The Kingdom offers wholeness and

integrity in a world of frailty, turmoil, and death. We are all in need of such

transformation and freedom, even at the peak of our physical vitality. For

paradoxically, healing itself reminds us of our ultimate mortality, of the bounds of the

body and the limits of this world we inhabit. Even those healed by Jesus, such as this

crippled woman, became at some point sick again and eventually died.

But in their healing, they glimpsed God at work in their world, creating anew.

Redeeming. The eternal becomes a moment in time. Without his healing, it is hard to

imagine that Jesus’ message of redemption and salvation would have resonated with

the people of his day, much less our own. For Jesus, healing is not so much about

breaking the laws of science, of which he as man could have known nothing. It was and

is about the power of God to transform lives and making all things new. About making

paths, and spines, straight again. And about making humankind free.

So, how do you know when you have been healed? Seems like an odd question, I

suppose. It should be obvious. When the pain is gone. When the fever has come down.

When the spine is straight. When the disease is no more. But I suggest that healing is

much more than the simple absence of visible disease and hurt. This simple Gospel

narrative today gives us a fuller and better answer. We are healed, when like the

woman of today’s account, we learn to praise God for his mercy. When we are ready to

once again focus outside ourselves we are healed, ironically even if we are at death’s

door. When we are no longer a slave to our own hurt and sin, we are healed. Finally, weare healed when, with the crowd of pilgrims flocking to Carey, Ohio, and the people of

the Synagogue of Jesus’ time, we remember each day to rejoice “at all the wonderful

things” that Christ continues to do in our day and in our lives.

Then and only then, my Friends, are we too set free.

Amen.

The Revd. Canon Dr. Frank Hegedűs